Professor Edward Tufte described sparklines as "data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics." They present a historical trend of data in the space of a typical word. Microsoft quickly jumped on the bandwagon and added three types of sparklines to Excel 2010. In this article, Bill "MrExcel" Jelen helps you understand sparklines and how they can benefit you.

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Professor Edward Tufte wrote about sparklines in his 2006 book, Beautiful Evidence. He described them as "data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics." The idea is to present a historical trend of data in the space of a typical word. Microsoft added three types of sparklines to Excel 2010.

Consider the data set in the following figure. Take a few seconds and scan the data. Can you easily spot which products are trending up? Trending down? Staying flat? It is pretty tough with just a range of numbers.